Thematically Le Samourai is the bleakest and most austere of Melville's films, its central figure pushed to a remarkable degree of stylized impassivity.
--Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (The Viking Press, 1972).
Montage is the heartbeat of a film.
Jean-Pierre Melville.
First and foremost, Le Samourai is a beautiful film, its colors beautifully controlled by a director who was a master of black-and-white (the cinematographer on Le Samourai was Henri Decae). The colors are mainly blue, grey, black and brown, portraying the bleak world of the hired killer Jef (Alain Delon) and the police that pursue him. The low-key score is by Francois de Roubaix.
Jef lives in a cheap room with a caged bird for companionship. He plays poker and has a girlfriend, but the main point of his relationships is to have alibis. He only kills those he is contracted to kill and he goes to his death when he pulls an unloaded gun on the woman who betrayed him (she saw him kill someone but worked for his employer) and is shot by the police.
The main influences on Melville when he made this film were John Huston and The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Melville's favorite film), especially in the line-up scenes; Graham Greene's This Gun for Hire (1936) and Frank Tuttle's film version (1942), starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and Robert Bresson's Pickpocket,(1959) both for the use of montage in the Metro and its minimalist use of expression using just the eyes (both Bresson and Melville of course were influenced by Buster Keaton's expressiveness using only his eyes). Melville transcended all these influences with his own world of the existential cat-and-mouse game between the criminal and the police.
Addendum: for my posts about other Melville films see Jun. 12 2014, Oct. 8 2017, Apr. 8 2018,
July 5 2018
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